Office 2010 works with many different Operating System Windows versions, however innovations in Windows 7 are seamlessly integrated with Office 2010 to help you work more efficiently. Here are just a few of the ways that Office 2010 and Windows 7 are better together:

Fast access to Office 2010 programs and files

You can put your Office 2010 programs in Windows 7 taskbar by drag and drop program's icon to taskbar, then using the program icon in taskbar to open new Office 2010 document.

Also you can use Windows 7 Jump Lists to access Office 2010 files and files you use every day, to see the Jump List display all your recent Word documents, right click Work icon in your taskbar.

Create Outlook 2010 attachments in an instant

This can be done easily by drag and drop your document from Jump List to your e-mail, tasks and calendar items.

View Multiple Office 2010 documents with Snap

The new Windows 7 Snap feature allow you to easily compare two documents by drag one document to the left side of your screen and the other to the right, and Windows 7 will automatically adjust the window size to align the documents for side-by-side view.

Stress-free presentations with PowerPoint 2010

Showing your PowerPoint 2010 presentation is much easier in Windows 7, just press Windows Logo Key+P and Windows 7 will present all display options.

Put Office 2010 at your fingertips with Windows Touch

You can now set aside that mouse and keyboard and use your fingers to flip through your documents in your laptop and touch enabled PCs running Windows 7 with the new touch-navigation capability.

Keep your Office 2010 files in sync with Windows 7

If you work with your Office 2010 documents over a network using Windows 7 you can keep offline copy of your documents locally and when connect to network all the files you worked on offline will automatically be synced with their network versions.

Consistence design across Office 2010 and Windows 7

The consistence use of Ribbon across Windows 7 and Office 2010 makes it easy to discover features and be more efficient.

Related Posts:

Why DPM 2010 and SQL are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-sql-are-better-together.aspx

Why DPM 2010 and Hyper-V are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-hyper-v-are-better-together.aspx

Why DPM 2010 and Exchange 2010 are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-exchange-2010-are-better-together.aspx

Many companies estimate that nearly 50% of their data resides only on someone’s laptop, which is often travelling or remote to any company datacenter.

PC administrators are looking for a better way to protect and recover Windows® laptops. Microsoft has heard from our customers and partners and delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010.

Maximizing Protection of Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Data Protection Manager

New in DPM 2010 is the ability to protect workstations and laptops, especially the “disconnected” laptop of the remote or travelling employee. DPM is designed for an IT generalist and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your data – without requiring an advanced degree, training or certification in storage and backup technologies.

DPM allows you to select client data types such as “My Documents” or “Desktop” to be included or excluded from protection, as well as file types such as MP3 or WMV. After you select the kinds of data that you want to protect, DPM will locate the specific directories on each PC for protection

There are two mode of protection, Online Protection and Offline Protection:

Online Protection

While your laptops are on the corporate network, or remotely connected via a VPN or Direct Access, the DPM server will protect the laptops to the DPM disk, and then potentially to DPM tape, another DPM server offsite, as well as to cloud providers that are partnered with Microsoft DPM.

Offline Protection

After choosing data types for protection and setting the retention and synchronization schedule, the DPM server sends the protection policy to each laptop so that protection happens while you are disconnected from the corporate network.

Flexible User Protection

While you can define a corporate policy such as “My Doc’s” and “Desktop” for protection, you can also optionally choose to enable end users to add additional directories on their local machines for protection.

In this way, users do not have to change their work flow, reinstall applications or move data within their hard drives in order to have their key data directories protected by the DPM 2010 server.

How to Restore Client Data with DPM

DPM 2010 provides three data restore methods, based on scenario:

• From the DPM server, you can use the DPM Administration Console to browse any recovery points on the DPM server and restore the data from disk or tape, to any network file share or directory.
• From the Windows client’s DPM applet, you can open an entire recovery point (all data from a previous point in time) so that you can browse directories and restore large amounts of data. This can also be done between machines, so that from LaptopB, you can browse any recovery points from LaptopA that you had access to (for migration or replacement scenarios).
• From the Windows client’s Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office, you can restore individual files or directories using the ‘Previous Versions Client’ technology built into Windows 7 and Vista (or installable onto Windows XP).

Related Posts:

Why DPM 2010 and SQL are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-sql-are-better-together.aspx

Why DPM 2010 and Hyper-V are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-hyper-v-are-better-together.aspx

Why DPM 2010 and Exchange 2010 are Better Together? http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/03/why-dpm-2010-and-exchange-2010-are-better-together.aspx

For Environment with high percentage of clients are using Outlook 2003, and because there are some common client access considerations for outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010, then some preparations on client side should be done to cover all considerations as the following:

Encryption:

Exchange 2010 includes additional “out of the box” security for Client communications to the Exchange Server which is encryption between the Client and the Server which is enabled by default, for more information http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee332317.aspx.

Prior to Outlook 2007, encryption was not enabled on the Client side, by default, however if profile for Outlook 2007 exist where encryption is disabled, or if Outlook 2003 profiles created with default settings are used with Exchange Server 2010, the connection will fail when Outlook attempts to connect to an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox, One or more of the following common error message will be displayed:

· Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. The set of folders could not be opened.

· Unable to open your default e-mail folders. The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance.

· The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

· Unable to open your default e-mail folders. The information store could not be opened.

· Outlook could not log on. Check to make sure you are connected to the network and are using the proper server and mailbox name. The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

There are several methods to work around this issue, from immediate manual change by the administrator or the user, to deployment of administrative templates or new profiles, each of these scenarios are documented in the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2006508.

Note

In Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1, the RPC encryption requirement has been disabled, by default. Any new Client Access Servers (CAS) deployed in the organization will not require encryption. However, any CAS servers deployed prior to Service Pack 1, or upgraded to Service Pack 1, will retain the existing RPC encryption requirement setting. Also bear in mind disabling the RPC encryption requirement on a CAS server won't lower the security between Outlook 2007/2010 and any CAS server as RPC communication for these Outlook versions will remain encrypted.

Recommendation

It is recommended to apply Outlook Encryption Administrative template through GPO as described in Microsoft KB Article to enable Outlook RPC Encryption on all existing Outlook 2003 clients.

New Mail Notifications and UDP

Exchange 2010 no longer supports UDP for new mail notifications. However, Outlook 2003 relied primarily upon UDP notifications to display new messages and changes to folders. The result is that Outlook 2003 users will see delays in updates to folders and the Send/Receive process appears to take a long time.

The following article discusses the issue and two possible resolutions for the organization http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009942.

The two available workarounds for this issue are as the following:

· Install Update Rollup 1 for Exchange 2010.

· User cached mode with outlook 2003 profile.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update all clients Outlook profile to use Cashed Mode.

Public Folder, Offline Address Book and Free/Busy

Outlook 2003 uses the Public Folders free/busy messages to determine availability in the Calendar and as the source for Offline Address Book synchronization. If Public Folders are not configured during Exchange Server 2010 setup, Offline Address Book and Free/Busy will not be available to Outlook 2003 users. These users will encounter connection errors.

If free/busy Public Folders folder is not replicated to Exchange Server 2010, users will encounter the following http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945602.

The following error message will be displayed if no public folder replicas for free/busy information were on Exchange 2010:

“0x8004010F” Error message:

· When outlook synchronizes an offline address book with Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010, this if clients inside the organization or connected via VPN/RAS, and the organization uses a Proxy server, the Client Access Server should be listed in the “Bypass proxy server for local addresses” configuration http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939765.

· When try to synchronize address list on an Exchange Server while using Outlook 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905813.

Opening Additional Mailboxes

Opening other user’s folders or mailboxes are a common operation in the enterprise, Outlook 2003 users may encounter issues if the environment is not properly prepared for this use the following:

· Office Outlook 2003 does not connect to two or more additional mailboxes in a mixed Exchange 2007 and Exchange Server 2010 environment http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978777.

· An error occurs when an Exchange server 2003 user tries to open more that delegate mailboxes of Exchange Server 2010 in Outlook 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979690.

Recommendation

It is recommended to upgrade all Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2 or higher http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;924470.

RPC over HTTP Connectivity

The following article discusses issues with Outlook 2003 connectivity when the RPC proxy server extensions do not load correctly, and this article applied to Exchange 2010 connections http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919092.

Note

If the mentioned error shown while migration pilot one of the proposed solution will be tested to solve the issue.

Unified Communication

Integration features between Outlook 2003 and Office Communicator and functionality with Office Communication Server have been documented in the following documents:

· The presence information for a Communications Server user may not appear, or may appear intermittently, in Outlook 2003 Service Pack 2 or in Outlook 2007 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968099.

· Communicator does not update the free/busy information as scheduled http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941103.

Recommendation

It is recommended to follow the solutions in KB article “http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968099” to avoid the related presence issue, also it is recommended to upgrade all Outlook 2003 clients to Outlook 2003 Service Pack 3 because Outlook 2003 Service Pack 2 is no longer supported, this beside apply Outlook 2003 fix http://support.microsoft.com/?id=971366 that will solve some Outlook issues as listed in the KB article.

Related Posts:

Transition Process to Upgrade from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010: http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/22/high-level-transition-process-to-upgrade-from-exchange-2007-to-exchange-2010.aspx

In this series of posts I started with giving an overview about Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting here, and in this post I will go through Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting Description,

Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting introduces a new multi-tenant model with accompanying PowerShell Cmdlets. In this new design each specific Exchange Object (such as an Address List) associated with an organization is stored in its own Configuration Unit within the Configuration Container is Active Directory. So address lists, for example, are clearly tied to an organization and isolated. There is no need for the extra security settings and complex pointers that we used in HMC to associate Exchange Objects with a tenant organization. User objects are then stored in a tenant specific OU. This is what makes the product "natively" multi-tenant and is an example of why the previous Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) provisioning engine was no longer needed for Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting.

Another significant benefit is that the provisioning performance is much faster, and also more efficient in terms of the amount of code needed to leverage the Cmdlets. This allows a lot of flexibility for ISVs to create solutions on top of this, such as a reseller model and providing an API for Control Panels to leverage.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 supports hosting deployments and provides Hosting Partners the core feature-set of Exchange Server in a manner that can be deployed to multiple customers in a single installation, and provides ease of management and flexibility of provided features to end-users.

The hosting solution available for Exchange 2010 SP1 includes most of the features and functionality available in Exchange 2010 SP1 Enterprise deployments, but also includes features and functionality that will allow you to create and manage tenant organizations.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 will form part of the suite of multi-tenant capable products that will replace the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5 solution.

The following features and functionality are unique to hosting deployments:

• Hosting Installation   When you install Exchange 2010 SP1 for hosting deployments, you will run the installation from the command line and include the /hosting switch. Once installed, your servers will be running in Hosting Mode.
• Tenant Organization Configuration   Because you will be creating and managing multiple organizations in the hosting deployment, you can use cmdlets and parameters that aren't available to Enterprise deployments.
• Service Plans   A service plan allows you to enable or disable certain features when deploying tenant organizations. They simplify tenant administration by automatically setting up feature configuration and automatic feature provisioning of mailboxes. In addition, service plans allow you to grant the correct set of RBAC permissions to tenant based on available features.
• Mailbox Plans   A mailbox plan is a template that automatically populates multiple user properties and assigns default permissions to new or existing user accounts. You use mailbox plans to provision accounts for a particular user population with a common default configuration.

In the coming post in this series I will go deeply in Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting Deployment and Installation steps that you will enjoy.

Related Posts:

• Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting – Part 1 “Overview” http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/31/exchange-2010-sp1-hosting-part1-overview.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
• Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting – Part 2 “Hosting Description” http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2010/12/31/exchange-2010-sp1-hosting-part1-hosting-description.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
• Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting – Part 3 “Hosting Setup” http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2011/03/14/exchange-2010-sp1-hosting-part-3-hosting-setup.aspx
• Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting - Part 4 "Multi-Tenant Setup" http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2011/05/15/exchange-2010-sp1-hosting-part4-multi-tenant-setup.aspx

A specific type of replication that is powerful for distributed environments is merge replication. The power of merge replication is that it enables multiple subscribers to update back to the publisher database. This means that you can have multiple replicas of the same database (or parts of it using filters) at different dispersed locations. These databases can serve different sites in your distributed organization with minimum latency, while maintaining consistency and getting latest updates from the other databases.

 Note: There is another option to reach a similar result which is Transactional Replication with Updatable Subscriptions; however, it will be removed from the next feature of SQL Server so it’s better to avoid it. For more information on this replication type, please check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151718(v=SQL.105).aspx

 The main scenario for merge replication is a company that has many regional offices. Each of the offices needs to have a subset of the data pertaining to its work; moreover, there are master data coming from the central office that the different offices can read and utilize but not update. The central location will have the full copy of the data. A diagram of this scenario is as follows:

For an overview of merge replication, please check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152746.aspx . The scenario for merge replication is present at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151790(v=SQL.105).aspx

When using this type of replication for a solution, care needs to be taken with some of the options of the replication. Notably, the following:

1.       Merge Replication adds a uniqueidentifier column to each table. This can affect the application if the developer didn’t build it with the additional column initially created; moreover, it increases the size of the table.

2.       Set the direction of the articles properly. If an article is read-only at the subscriber, then set its properties to “Download Only to Subscriber”

3.       Set Identity Ranges for the different tables using the publisher range size, subscriber range size and range threshold. You can read more on identity columns in Merge replication at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152543(v=SQL.105).aspx

4.       Create Filters to filter data across the different locations.  This will decrease the size of the database at each replica as well as alleviate any security concerns of storing data of one location in all the other locations. Filter rules are explained at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152478.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152486.aspx

My next blog entry will include a sample merge replication creation step-by-step